LEARN MORE!
Many businesses know how to use LinkedIn as a great networking resource; however, they tend to leave out LinkedIn marketing. It’s a great resource for B2B marketers by significantly elevating digital marketing efforts so you easily connect with customers and prospects.
Ninety-six percent of B2B marketers report Linkedin is an invaluable tool in their marketing efforts. There are many ways to generate leads and boost brand awareness using LinkedIn that businesses don’t know about. We’ll explore some of them here to show you how to leverage this powerful tool.
What is LinkedIn marketing?
LinkedIn marketing involves growing your businesses by leveraging connections to cultivate relationships, generate leads, and boost brand awareness. Marketing through LinkedIn shares your business’s value proposition with leads who already have some interest in your business or your industry.
Since you’re exposed to like-minded people in groups and forums on Linkedin, you’re one step closer to reaching ready-to-convert prospects. Sending a quick message or sharing valuable information in groups are among popular marketing strategies on LinkedIn. These focus on persuasive tactics that are less like the traditional hard-selling strategies that work on other social platforms.
Why LinkedIn marketing?
You may be wondering why you’d need LinkedIn marketing. Afterall, you’re already killing it on other social media platforms. However, there’s a lot to gain from promoting your brand on one more social media platform — Linkedin.
SproutSocial, a software company, reports that businesses using LinkedIn for marketing gain 277 percent more leads than those that don’t. Here are three ways LinkedIn marketing’s unique features can benefit your business.
- Build brand awareness. Using LinkedIn to build brand awareness in B2B lead generation is almost effortless thanks to the professional mindset of the audience. Building a community here is an excellent way to develop brand awareness.
The first step is to define your target audience for your community. This is easily done thanks to demographic reporting. You can see your chosen demographic interests and tailor marketing material to match them. Sharing content that shows your brand as a thought leader also helps you earn stakeholders’ trust and attention.
- Generate leads and pitch prospects. Generating leads with LinkedIn Marketing is vital for any business interested in consistent revenue. Connecting with top executives your business can offer value to allows you to pitch to them in a business environment, which may make them more receptive.
As the B2B buyer process becomes more complex, prospects are now self-guided and will refer to your LinkedIn page to see if your offer matches their business needs. Once you connect and establish a common ground, a stellar strategy for pitching prospects can drive quick purchase decisions.
- Establish strategic partnerships. Connecting with the right people allows you to gain new insights and learn valuable information to share with your audience. Partnering with similar businesses can also grow your audience by putting you in front of said partners’ audience. You can also gain access to other helpful resources you may not have in your business arsenal.
LinkedIn Marketing: Tips and Tricks
Optimize your business page
Optimizing your LinkedIn business page gives your audience and prospective customers more information about your brand and what you do. It also makes your content easier to find and engage with, which is excellent for lead generation. Let’s look at how you can optimize your business pages on LinkedIn.
- Use keywords + business links. Incorporating keywords (terms users might use to search for your product or service) organically on your page boosts visibility. Don’t limit keywords to just your posts.
You can also use them in your LinkedIn company page description and About section to show prospective connections you have what they’re looking for. Sharing business links on your page, such as linking to your website on a post from the LinkedIn page, also boosts visibility for the landing page.
- Business photos + logos. Including rich media in your content makes it more appealing and easier to digest. More people are interested in visual content, so posts containing things such as infographics tend to be a hit. However, don’t oversaturate your content with photos. Include three or four images in your posts to see the most performance.
Using your logos and business photos adds more credibility and authenticity, so the audience feels like they’re connecting with you. It also helps build brand awareness because if they see your logos often enough, they’ll instantly recognize them.
- Consistency is key. Consistency is a crucial part of every digital marketing strategy, and it works the same way on LinkedIn marketing. Establish how frequently you’ll post and stick to a regular schedule so your audience always knows when to expect new content.
Your frequency could vary depending on factors such as your audience’s peak engagement periods. It also helps if you’re consistent with engagements, such as sharing valuable resources, responding to comments, and engaging in relevant, trending discussions.
Share engaging and inclusive content
Posting inclusive content that resonates with a diverse audience, such as refraining from using divisive or sensitive language, is a powerful way to engage with prospects and get them to convert. When crafting LinkedIn content, remember that salesy content can come off as spammy, so avoid hard-selling content and focus on sharing knowledge.
Providing fresh content that shows your thought leadership is essential to proving your business is reliable. Content should also be engaging and exciting. A blog post, essay, or report can be great for sharing information, but posting only these styles of content can get monotonous.
Things like quizzes and polls offer variety and test how you’re willing to engage your audience and what they know about your brand. Develop a content strategy that has something different and impactful for wherever your audience may be in their customer journey. Your team should target this content to match their position in the funnel, making them more likely to convert.
Creating content frequently can be challenging, especially when you have a rich existing content base. This is where repurposing content comes in. You can recycle popular posts and content that resonate with your audience. For example, take a high-performing video and use it as the basis for a blog post or infographic. You’ll have fresh content users are likely to engage heavily with.
Establish employee advocacy as a word-of-mouth strategy
People tend to trust word-of-mouth content as they believe it holds more credibility. Therefore, using various styles of user-generated content works to your advantage immensely in LinkedIn marketing. Employees’ posts can be an excellent resource for expanding your business reach. Ask employees to create stand-out personal LinkedIn profiles that include job descriptions and roles in your business, appropriate photos, and work history. A good profile makes their posts more credible and appealing. You can also contribute to this by hiring professional photographers to take suitable headshots.
Also, encourage them to share your business posts and links to their networks to expand your reach. User-generated content, such as testimonials and shoutouts, can propel prospects further in their buying journey and act as a conversion tool.
Reviews from previous and existing employees also serve as positive reviews for your business and encourage more people to connect with the company. Social mentions are powerful, too, and getting them from your closest resource, employees, can boost your brand’s reputation.
Posts from personal accounts tend to get more traffic, and brand accounts can have limited reach, so having your employees act as cheerleaders for the business helps grow your page. Of course, this would be at the discretion of your employees and of their own free will as it is their personal social media account.
Why leverage LinkedIn automation tools?
Keeping track of the many moving parts of a successful digital marketing campaign can be exhausting, and doing so manually can often lead to mistakes. LinkedIn automation tools help with more repetitive tasks and make B2B LinkedIn lead generation more efficient.
A 2019 survey by Social Media Today showed that 75 percent of marketers were using automation tools. These numbers come as no surprise as they save time and valuable resources you can use in other aspects of the business. They can also conduct tests on best-performing content, track their performance, and provide regular reports.
These tools can help with finding prospects by identifying connections that fit your prospect profile and parameters, and sending them connection requests. Automation tools are also advanced enough to send personalized messages with relevant offers to the same contacts they set you up with in the first place. Tools also help with automating marketing campaigns.
As businesses connect with audiences worldwide, it’s hard to rely on only employees/human efforts to respond to messages round the clock. You can set up automated responses that are triggered when a prospect reaches out via messaging to ensure inquiries aren’t left unanswered .
What’s great about many automation tools today is that they can be completely personalized to suit your specific needs. For example, if you only need your tool to respond to messages, get a plan that offers strictly automated messaging. The icing on the cake is you’ll get more bang for your buck and avoid wasting resources on capabilities you don’t need.
Features like personalized plans are what make Zopto stand out from the competition. We offer a variety of plans that help make the most of LinkedIn marketing for your business’s specific needs. Don’t believe us? Contact us today for a free trial and explore how Zopto’s features can help improve your marketing strategies.
